This invention relates to a the field of tissue engineering. More specifically, the invention relates to patterned cell sheets and to a method for their production.
Regenerative medicine is a new upcoming discipline within the field of medical sciences. There are numerous methods and approaches used in regenerative medicine. They can coarsely be divided into four areas, including tissue engineering in vitro and in vivo:
In tissue engineering in vitro, tissue is grown outside the body utilising scaffolds and cells. The engineered tissue is subsequently implanted in a patient in order to replace damaged or lost tissue.
In tissue engineering in vivo, scaffolds are placed in damaged tissue areas with the aim of inducing growth of cells from the surrounding healthy tissue to restore damaged tissue.
However, the use of scaffold suffers from many disadvantages and short-comings. In specific applications, cell sheet engineering can avoid the limitations of scaffold based tissue reconstruction and cell therapies. Cell sheets have been used for the reconstruction of ocular surface tissue, periodontal ligaments, cardiac patches and bladder augmentation. For more complex applications it is required that cells are placed in specific locations or predetermined patterns, hence patterned cell-sheets are desired. For the reconstruction of even more complex tissues, the use of heterogeneous multicellular sheets is needed. For this purpose different cell types have to be co-cultured in a patterned fashion in order to obtain a cell sheet in which the different cell types are micro-patterned in a desired pattern.
State of the art methodologies to obtain patterned cell sheets are based upon patterning the surface on which the cells are cultured. These methodologies require that each substrate is patterned separately using (soft)lithography. Furthermore these methodologies do not facilitate the production of freestanding patterned cell sheets.